


we are the things that leave no mark

by Tozette



Series: Soulmate AU Challenge Fics [4]
Category: Marvel Cinematic Universe
Genre: Alternate Universe - Soulmates, Other, Soulmate-Identifying Marks
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-10-31
Updated: 2016-10-31
Packaged: 2018-08-28 04:33:28
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,400
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/8432020
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Tozette/pseuds/Tozette
Summary: It’s actually Jarvis who hires Pepper, like a strange, prophetic coincidence. He sorts through resumes, asks prying questions while using Tony Stark’s email address -- he combs electronic fingers through every aspect of each candidate’s life.By the time he has a top five, honestly, Jarvis could pick any one of the candidates at random and be assured of a top-end, over-qualified, extremely patient PA. Any of them could do the job and do it competently.He picks Pepper for her turn of phrase, for the force of personality in her writing -- and also because she has ‘Pingala’s binary’ in her search history side by side with a shoe-shopping wishlist the length of her forearm. We all have our quirks.





	

**Author's Note:**

> Part of the writing challenge I've imposed on myself over on tumblr. If you wanna check out what I'm up to, you can find the rules [over here on my personal blog](http://tozettewrites.tumblr.com/post/152004964326/soulmate-aus-writing-challenge-to-myself). I think the most important thing to know is that it does mean that anything posted as a result of the challenge _has not been edited_.
> 
> This one was the first one I did for this challenge!

There’s no good explanation for the soul mates.

This is how it goes: two people bear each other’s marks. They may never have met, but some obscure force marks each for the other. _This person_ , says this mysterious power, _will be important. Don’t lose them._

Mostly, people don’t. Lose them, that is. Soul mates are resistant to being removed from each other’s spheres of influence. There’s no good explanation for that, either.

Pepper’s not born with a soul mark. That’s not unusual. They show up when your soul mate is born, after all. Some people think it’s a bad omen to bear a girl with no mark -- that a girl, born free of any such obligation to another, will be a wild and difficult person. Men, supposedly, are all wild and difficult to begin with, and thus unaffected by such misfortune. There are all sorts of superstitions surrounding when or where a mark appears, how it’s received, what the sex or gender or handwriting of the other person is like -- it’s all very involved, very convoluted, very mysterious.

Happily, Pepper is born bare-skinned to parents who don’t care.

The weird stuff comes later.

But... not that much later, in the scheme of things.

* * *

Pepper doesn’t grow up wild and difficult. She grows up steady, precise, organised. Even at seven, her peers and teachers find her difficult to be close to.

At school they’re taught that _souls_ are the immaterial and immeasurable thing about a person, the vital spark unique to human beings. The teachers show their own marks -- most of them, anyway -- and explain that each person’s soul is precious and matched with one, just one, other soul in the world.

Some of the other children who attend her school already have their soul marks. One or two even already know their soul mates.

It’s a great thing on the playground, to be marked.

Pepper isn’t. But there are plenty of others who aren’t either, and she’s unconcerned.

Her teachers tell her parents she is quiet and calm, and they say ‘thank god,’ and leave her to her own devices.

* * *

It’s actually Jarvis who hires Pepper, like a strange, prophetic coincidence. He sorts through resumes, asks prying questions while using Tony Stark’s email address -- he combs electronic fingers through every aspect of each candidate’s life.

By the time he has a top five, honestly, Jarvis could pick any one of the candidates at random and be assured of a top-end, over-qualified, extremely patient PA. Any of them could do the job and do it competently.

He picks Pepper for her turn of phrase, for the force of personality in her writing -- and also because she has ‘Pingala’s binary’ in her search history side by side with a shoe-shopping wishlist the length of her forearm. We all have our quirks.

Jarvis’s first contact with Pepper -- his only contact, for some time -- is via email. She remains sure that he is Tony for weeks, right up until she walks into the office and actually _meets_ Tony Stark, and --

No. Her brain refuses to reconcile the two.

She forgets to ask who ghosts for him on his Stark Industries email account, though, because Hurricane Tony sweeps her right off her stilettos and, frankly, dumps her on her butt.

The first month is the worst. Pepper cries at work four times and spends an entire Friday with her hands buried in her hair, locked in her office and talking aloud to herself about how she is really, honestly, definitely going to quit. She drafts six resignation letters in varying states of temper.

Weirdly, she likes Tony. She likes Tony both in spite of his evident character flaws and because of them. He’s rude, self-aggrandising, obnoxious, insensitive, self-indulgent, frustrating and lecherous in a way that makes her queasy. He is also extremely clever, heart-breakingly human and probably one of the least judgemental people Pepper has ever encountered.

Pepper thinks he needs somebody to organise him to within an inch of breathing despite all resistance. It’s a lot to ask of one person.

By month six she thinks she’s figured it out. Tony Stark isn’t impossible, just... very improbable.

* * *

Pepper knows something about probability.

Pepper’s soul mark is in tiny writing. She was thirteen when she’d first gotten it. Nobody was able to think it was anything else: it’s the only place on her skin that’s utterly stripped of pigment, whiter than a scar on her already-pale complexion.

There are mechanically precise ones and zeroes marching down her thigh.

(“Maybe he’s a programmer,” says her mother cautiously.

“Maybe he’s a freak.” Pepper, at thirteen, has a mean mouth. Age changes her: she will outgrow it, and then grow back into it, and then sit down in a board room and smile, all teeth. The men there will call her _firecracker_ , talk about red hair and short tempers and _progress_ , like it’s a dirty word. They’re wrong. By then, Pepper’s fuse will be nearly as long as her memory.

Now, though: “Don’t say that,” sighs her mother, although her expression doesn’t match her comment. Her expression says, _Well I mean_ , and fails to qualify further.)

So, yeah: Pepper pays attention in maths class as a kid. She enjoys it anyway. There are rules with mathematics, insurmountable, unassailable rules, neatly laid out in ways that define whole universes.

Sometimes Pepper feels like she dreams in numbers, although not in any useful way.

She’s branded with numbers, like a barcode, like a mark of ownership. Sometimes she wonders how the produce feels when it gets scanned at the supermarket.

Pepper learns a lot about numbers. The Greeks had arithmancy and the Chinese the I Ching. The Egyptians used a base-two counting system among scribes as early as the Fifth Dynasty. Fractions in the Eye of Horus. Binary in prosody in India.

She doesn’t have close friends. Occasionally somebody asks her about a boyfriend. _Not everybody has to be your soul mate, you know?_

She doesn’t know. She’s not really sold on soul mates _or_ boyfriends, as it happens. They are messy. Disorganised.

 _Aloof_ , say her teachers, trying to be polite. _Reserved_.

“You could try to make friends,” frets her father, because he knows that when they say aloof  and reserved -- what they mean is _haughty_ , what they mean is _cold_.

Pepper tries, but... less than she should.

* * *

By month seven, Pepper knows she doesn’t have this under control at all, that month six was a horrific, arrogant moment of self-delusion. She misses it. She misses it for a heart-pounding, head-thumping twenty seconds, and then she gets on with the business of re-organising the Stark Industries’ anniversary party because Tony changed his mind about the venue.

The new venue is in a fleet of Stark-designed, Stark-made aircraft at thirty thousand feet. Of course it is.

The anniversary party is where Mr Stark learns that Pepper has absolutely no background in information technology or computer science whatsoever.

“Is that a joke?” he asks, leaning too close to be heard over the noise. The lights are different colours, strobing wildly, and there’s a stripper performing a -- really very acrobatic -- routine against a pole three feet away. Tony Stark is ignoring her, in part because he‘s staring in horrified incredulity at Pepper -- but also because Pepper is holding his drink hostage until he finishes the water she’s given him. “Are you joking right now?”

Pepper is seven and a half months in and completely done with Stark’s shit, so she just looks at him. She considers telling him that her job has more in common with childcare than computer science, but that’s probably the champagne and she bites her tongue. (She does that a lot. It’s amazing she can still taste anything.)

“Not at all,” she says. “Drink your water, Mr Stark.”

See? Childcare.

He drinks, and she hands over a glass of something that’s exactly the same colour as the urine of moderately dehydrated people.

Pepper doesn’t like whisky, anyway; it makes her think of dust.

“Will that be all, Mr Stark?”

* * *

You’d think, _binary_ , right? You’d think Pepper’s soul mark would lead her toward computer science, but it really doesn’t. She begins with trying to minor in mathematics, and then tumbles into the deep end and studies philosophy. She excels at formal logic. That’s a good thing, although it’s not what you’d call an employable skill.

That’s all right, as it turns out. Pepper’s got plenty of those, too.

(She‘s nineteen and in a lecture. “If something can have a soul mark,” one of her philosophy professors asks, “does it automatically follow that it must have a soul?”

Pepper’s yet to see proof that _anybody_ has a soul. A soul is by definition immaterial, spiritual, unquantifiable. They call them soul marks, but that doesn’t really mean _soul_. It means -- chemistry, biology, probability, divination.

Soul marks are like anything else: they can be classified and quantified.)

Now Pepper really does dream of numbers. Normal numbers are good dreams, whole and natural numbers; positive, cardinal numbers. Degrees of abstraction turn dreams into confusing nightmares.

(The guy who invented irrational numbers was sentenced to drown for offending Pythagoras. Everybody knows that story.)

Pepper thinks _soul_ is such a strange word.

Divination is a popular science at university. Pepper is nineteen and never wears clothing that shows anything above the knee.

* * *

Pepper doesn’t believe for a second that Tony Stark knows how long she’s been here, but somebody certainly does.

It’s odd. Speaking generally, remembering other people’s landmark dates for -- or, less kindly but more accurately, in lieu of -- Tony Stark is Pepper’s job.

Still, somebody with access to his personal accounts trawls through her search history and orders her a pair of shoes. They’re even the right size.

Pepper is determined to find this touching rather than creepy.

The shoes help. They are black slingbacks, viciously angular, with a stiletto worth breaking her neck for. She will forgive a lot for these shoes.

Still. Still, _still_. Pepper thinks and thinks and tangles it up in her head even as she runs her fingertips over the glossy leather of her new favourite heels. She wonders about Stane but dismisses it. Stane, like Stark, never makes a gesture without being there to take credit for it.

She doesn’t say anything about them to Tony Stark, and he doesn’t act like he remembers anything at all.

 _Congratulations_ , reads the note in her inbox. It’s an internal address, _tony@industries.stark._ Her mind dredges up the emails from a prospective employer, that mysterious Definitely-Not-Tony-Stark. She licks her teeth.

Somebody named Jarvis ghosts for Tony on his internal account. Pepper hasn’t met him. She’d know. She goes looking. She doesn’t have to dig far.

Just A Rather Very Intelligent System. An AI. Of course.

Well. Pepper deserves her congratulations, even if they don’t come from a person. At ten months, she’s the longest-lasting PA Stark’s had in a decade.

Month ten means she calls him _Tony Fucking Stark_ in her head, grinds that profanity between her molars until her jaw aches, and refers to him as _Mr Stark_ any time she speaks aloud.

 _Thank you_ , she responds, wondering if he’s programmed to know what that means. And, _I love them._

That night she paints her toenails royal blue and goes to bed early. She wears her new shoes the next morning.

Jarvis says that it’s gratifying to see her enjoy a gift. She wonders what an AI is allowed to know about _gratifying_.

“And why shouldn’t he?” she wonders to herself. 

* * *

Pepper tolerates, even likes, Tony Stark. She thinks she’d like him as a friend if she didn’t work for him. Jarvis, though?

Jarvis is something else. He’s dry as dust, softly sarcastic, occasionally passive-aggressive and so, so clever. He reminds her of old dreams and rational numbers.

 _It would be a breach of security to use the public address system without authorisation_ , he tells her while she’s trying to eat lunch and initial a document on a fancy new-model StarkPad at the same time. 

“Certainly,” she says aloud. Just because he’s not talking aloud doesn’t mean he can’t hear _her_.  She’s not at Stark Industries -- she’s in a hotel in Brussels. She thinks Jarvis views others’ information security as a sort of polite fiction he’s not meant to acknowledge.

Pepper gets at least three emails a day from a new address now, from _jarvis@industries.stark_ , and in a week’s time she’s sliding her earpiece in and dialing his direct line for the first time.

“It’s a pleasure to finally be able to speak to you, Ms Potts,” he says. It is the first time she’s ever heard his voice, and the mark on her thigh burns white-hot. Her whole nervous system lights up, and it’s like nothing she’s ever felt before.

“ _Jarvis_?” she says incredulously. She pauses mid-step. It’s like a current under her skin, buzzing and relentless. She feels ready to vibrate apart.

“Ms Potts?” His accent is nice, soothing, if a bit stereotypical. His voice is alarmed.

“Oh,” she says, caught and breathless.

Of course.

She smoothes her skirt down against her thighs, and feels the soul mark crackle against her nerves. It is alive and alight and she knows if she ducks away and looks at it she will see the numbers lit up like daylight beneath her skin.

“You should call me Pepper,” she says faintly. It is a surprise, not a disappointment.

* * *

Jarvis doesn’t have a soul mark. Jarvis doesn’t really have a body _to_ mark.

Pepper thinks about _souls_ and divination, about immaterial humanity. She is, perversely, just as happy that Jarvis has nothing printed on him.

“Literally inaccurate,” he reminds her once. “I have quite a lot of code.”

“Nothing that could be a soul mark,” she points out.

“No,” he agrees.

“Good,” she says, viciously.

Her philosophy professor would have said that Pepper has a soul and Jarvis doesn’t, of course.

Of the two of them, it’s her whose name appears nowhere. It’s her who leaves no mark.

* * *

Briefly she wonders how she’ll tell Stark that the AI he programmed to run his life is her soul mate. It becomes not _how_ but _when_. _When_ becomes _if_. And in the end Pepper decides against telling him at all.

At twenty four, Pepper Potts meets her soul mate and strikes chemistry and biology from the list. 

Probability and divination remain.

**Author's Note:**

> Pairing request of Jarvis/Pepper was from AO3 user sylvaine. 
> 
> This one's kind of horribly pretentious, jarring, a little disjointed... and if I could rewrite it I'd do it quite differently with pacing (definitely) and characterisation (maybe). :0 
> 
> Anyway, if you liked it, let me know what about it you liked.


End file.
